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ARCHITECTURALDRAWING " ANuDRAUGHTSMENBy REGINALD^^BLOMFIELD,.R.A.

WITH ONE HUNDRED AND THREE ILLUSTRATIONS

CASSELL 'S) COMPANY, LIMITEDLONDON, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE

1912


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A'A

:B5

LIBRARY

739102

IUmVERStTY OF TOIiOHTQ

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PREFACE

The following account of architectural drawing and draughtsmenis intended mainly for students, and its object is to show thatarchitectural draughtsmanship is not cut off from the family ofArt, but that, in the hands of artists of genius, it has gone far,and takes a higher place than has usually been assigned it byartists and critics. As a matter of fact, not very much attentionhas been paid to this subject in England. William Burges reada paper on architectural drawing at the Royal Institute of BritishArchitects in i860 ; an excellent and well-illustrated paper wasgiven there by Mr. Maurice B. Adams in 1885 ; and a book onarchitectural drawing, by Mr. R. Phene Spiers, himself an ad-irable

draughtsman, appeared in 1887. Mr. Adams's paperis valuable for its account of EngUsh architectural draughtsmenof the last century; Mr. Spiers's book for its very useful hintson the mecanique of drawing.

The standpoint from which the present work is written isdifferent. I have endeavoured to extend the conception ofdraughtsmanship by including in my survey French and Italiandraughtsmen, some of whom are very little known or studied inEngland, and incidentally to widen its range by including menwho were designers almost as much as draughtsmen, such as theLepautre, the Marot, and the French draughtsmen of the seven-eenth

and eighteenth centuries. The tendency of students is toconcentrate on the favourite manner of the time, and neglect anyother. This is not the way to become a fine draughtsman, and theillustrations that I have brought together are intended to correct


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VI Preface

this tendency, by showing that there is no royal road to draughts-anship.The basis of it must be the study of form, and its

mastery ; and its final expression must be fine drawing inspiredby personal temperament. I should add that my account in nosense claims to be exhaustive, and I need hardly point out tostudents that though I have, of necessity, laid stress on draughts-anship,

the object of their training is not the production of abnUiant drawing at our annual exhibitions, but the finer and farmore difficult task of designing noble architecture.

I must express my obHgations to the Keeper of the Printsand Drawings in the British Museum, to the Librarian of theRoyal Institute of British Architects (Mr. Dircks), to the Wardenand Fellows of All Souls' CoUege, the Provost and Fellows ofWorcester College, Oxford, and to the Trustees and the Curatorof the Soane Museum (Mr. Walter Spiers), for their courteouspermission to reproduce the drawings in their custody.

Reginald Blomfield.

New Court, Temple,September, 1912


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CONTENTS

PAGEHAPTER

1. The Nature and Purpose of Architectural Drawing

"Medieval Drawings i

2. Architectural Draughtsmen of the Sixteenth Cen-ury

: Bramante"

The San Gallo"

The Du

Cerceau" De L'Orme 19

3. French Draughtsmen of the Seventeenth Century.

37

4. Some Italian Draughtsmen of the Seventeenth and

Eighteenth Centuries, and Piranesi...

55

5. English Architectural Draughtsmen....

72


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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ALGARDIBarbaro, Daniele

Berain, Jean

Bernini, Lorenzo(Attributed to)

Bibiena, Giuseppe GalliDA

. . .

Bramante

Burges

Campbell, Colin

Canaletto, or Can-ale, A. .

Choisy, a,.

Coner, Andreas.

CoTMAN, John SellDaniel, William

.

De l'Orme, Philibert

Desgodetz, AntoineDe Vries

Design for Monument to Leo XL .Frontispiece of Daniele Barbaro's edition of

"Vitruvius," Venice, 1556.A Design for Decoration ....Designs for Escutcheons by Brisuile, Engraved

by Berain ......Drawing of Fountain

A Theatrical Scene......

Drawing for Stage Scenery ....Drawing of a Catafalque.

. . . .

Drawing for the Angles of a CeiUng (probably by)Sketch

........

Drawing for Scenery. . . . .

Engraving in the British Museum .Sheet of Studies by Bramante and Peruzzi. From

De Geymiiller's " Primitive Projects forSt. Peter's at Rome "...

A Page from the Vellum Sketch Book .The General Front of Blenheim. From " Vitru

vius Britannicus," Vol. I.The Prospect of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich

From " Vitruvius Britannicus," Vol. I.

The Piazza of St. Mark's, VeniceIsometrical Drawing from " L'Art de Bitir chez

les Romains ".

Drawing from " The Book of Andreas Coner "Dieppe .......

PACING PAGE60

View of Dance's Design for the Improvement ofthe Port of London

....

Detail of Roof from Regnault Chaudiere's editionof " Nouvelles Inventions," etc., X., 292

Plate from " Les l^dificesAntiques de Rome "Sheet of Details

30

47

4857

62a63a62b63662c63c246

25616

78

7861

12

25886

87

2765434


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List of IllustrationsDiETTERLIN, WENDELEgger

.

Falda, G. p.Francini, AlexanderFONTANA, DoMENICO

Gandon, J. .

GiBBS, James

GiRTiN, Thomas

Jones, Inigo

FACING PAGEA Design 35A German Drawing. End of Fifteenth Century.

From Egger's " Architektonische Handzeich-nungen " . . . . . . -17

The Fountain in the Piazza Navona, Rome. 56

Plate IX., " Livre d'Architecture " . . .36Raising the Great Obelisk of the Vatican : " The

Guglia." Plate 18 of " Delia Trasportazionedell' Obelisco Vaticano "

. . FrontispieceThe Frontispiece of "Delia Trasportazione dell'

Obelisco Vaticano ".

Section of Kedlestonnicus," Vol. IV.

St. Martin's in the Fields,of Architecture "

Notre Dame, Paris.

Porte St. Denis, ParisA Proscenium.Drawing of WhitehallStudies for a ChurchA Plan

. . . .

From " Vitruvius Britan-

From Gibbs's " Book

Lelio Orsi DA Novellara Design for Wall Decoration(Attributed to)

Lepautre, Jean

Lepautre, PierreLiagno, Teodoro Filippo

DA ...

Malton, Thomas .Marot, Daniel .

Marot, Jean

Design for Panels. Engraved by Le BlondDesigns for a Frieze .....Designs for Arabesques. Engraved by MarietteDesign for a Chimneypiece. Engraved by Le

BlondVaseVase .......Namur. From the " Cabinet du Roi " .

Pen and Wash Drawing of Altar-pieceSt. George's, Hanover Square .Besan9on. From the "Cabinet du Roi".Design for a Ceiling ....Design for a Ceiling ....Design for a State CoachA Triumphal Arch. Figures probably by Daniel

Marot ......Lemercier's Entrance to the LouvreThe Sorbonne. From the " Petit Marot "

55

80

7988897374757626b

373839

40414142

5986

43444546

495051


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^

ARCHITECTURAL DRAWING ANDDRAUGHTSMEN

CHAPTER I

THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF ARCHITECTURAL DRAWING "

MEDIEVAL DRAWINGS

Architectural draughtsmanship has fallen from the high placeit once occupied, and has been cut off from the main stream ofArt, and in the following chapters I hope, by reference to thepast, to recover some of this lost territory, and to disentanglethe ideals to be aimed at in such drawing, and the point of viewfrom which it should be approached. To arrive at this result Ido not intend to offer a technical disquisition on geometrical draw-ng,

isometrical projection, perspective and skiography, essentialas all these are in the student's training, but rather to enlargethe scope of our conception of architectural drawing by tracingits development in the past and by reviewing the work of certaingreat masters of the art, of men who have risen above the ranksof the mere technician, not only by their dexterity, but by rarerquaUties of selection, insight, and imaginative power.

The tendency to concentrate attention on contemporary work,to the neglect of the study of the past, is peculiarly dangerous inthe case of the Arts, because the standard of appreciation, thetests to be applied to the works of Hving artists, are apt todegenerate through simple ignorance of what has actually beendone in the past ; and though, of course, students will note thework of their contemporaries, and indeed cannot help doing so, it


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2 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmenis not here that one should search for the touchstone of criticism,but in the achievements of men long since dead.

In this brief survey I do not include the work of livingdraughtsmen, excellent as many of them are, because it is notfor artists to criticise the works of their professional brethren,and it is exceedingly difficult to judge fairlyand accurately thework of men with whom we are brought into daily contact, andwho in some cases enjoy more, and in some less, reputationthan they are fairlyentitled to. Fashion has so much to do withcurrent reputations, that the only safe standard to judge by isthat set by men who have long been recognised by competentjudges as past masters of their art. For that, after all, is theonly working test. Ingenious writers may find transcendentmerit in the work of some long-forgottenartist, and in some rareinstances the merit is genuine, particularlyin the case of architectswhose work is difficult to trace, and whom not only the publicbut artists are slow to recognise. But the verdict of time is seldomwholly wrong, and students, at any rate in their period of train-ng,

wiU be wise to take as their masters only those artists whosereputation has stood the test of time, and to regard with an openmind, and even suspend judgment on, methods and models thatare still in the melting-pot.

It is always a difficult problem to assess contemporaryprogress. There is the danger of mistaking a fancy of the timefor a genuine movement, and the scorn with which one may betempted to regard the work of two or three generations back mayrecoil on one's own head. There was an example of this in theexhibition of the work of deceased masters at Burlington House afew years ago in the case of the late Mr. Frith. The attitude of artcritics to the works of that artist was well known, but his pictureof " Ramsgate Sands," a comparatively early work, exhibited atechnique scarcely inferior to that of Hogarth himself. It was


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Purpose of Architectural Drawing 3not that the critics were substantiallywrong, but that their surveywas incomplete. The verdict of time is lost sight of in the crazefor the latest thing in Art, and this is one of the pitfallshat liein wait for the student. The ease and rapiditywith which ideascan be interchanged is actually a danger in the Arts. A hundredyears ago and earher there were fashions too, but they werefashions of considerable soHdity, changing not year by year, butgeneration by generation,and the student in mastering thefashion of his generationat any rate mastered one manner fairlj-completely. Nowadays he is apt to dash from one manner toanother, and never arrives at anything. It is essential that thestudent, in selectinghis models for imitation, should fortifyhisjudgment by the study of history and the analysisof old work.

A good deal of caution is wise in appreciatingthe progressof contemporary draughtsmanship. These brilliant water-colours,these audacious presentationsof architecture that thrill the unwaryin our modem exhibitions" are they reallybetter than the drawmgsof fiftyyears ago ? Or is it only their novelty and contempt foraccepted traditions that seduce our judgment ? Are our line andwash drawings up to the standard of Girtin ? Is there any Uvingdraughtsman who can use his pen and his blot as Piranesi didin his improvisations,hose Hghtning transcriptsof his imagination?One has to admit that there are no such draughtsmen to-day.But, on the other hand, if one shifts the standard, if one com-ares

modem drawing or modem architecture with what wasaccepted as such in England fifty years ago, I do not doubtthat there is a marked improvement. In spite of much thatis extravagant and even absurd, our modem architectural draw-ngs

are better than the laborious perspectives,he wiry andinsensitive line, the absurd conventions, and the acrid colouringof the draughtsmen of the 'sixties and 'seventies. And thereason why I venture this assertion is that the fashionable archi-


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4 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmenlecture " and with it the draughtsmanship " of the middle of thenineteenth century was founded on no soHd basis of inheritance ;it sprang out of nothing in history, and it has ended in nothing,except that, as a reaction against this unprofitable emptiness,artists have gone back to earUer traditions. In recent yearsthey have attached themselves more particularlyto the Frenchtradition of draughtsmanship, which in the last twenty years hasto some extent dominated this country and has taken completepossession of America. Fine as that tradition is, it is by nomeans the complete and only standard of architectural draughts-anship

; far from it ; it is itself only a very dexterous con-entionwhich attains its perfectionby eliminatinghalf the pro-lem.

We must go much farther afield than this if we are toimderstand the whole gamut of notes on which a great architec-ural

draughtsman can play.That, however, is a point which will appear later,and we muststart with a clear conception of the province and intention of archi-ectural

drawing and illustration,for the subject is a large one, andcannot be dealt with exclusivelyfrom one point of view. Gener-lly,

the object of architectural drawing is the representation ofarchitecture. It will include a wide field of draughtsmanship,ranging from the plainest and most practical working drawingmade for the purpose of actual building, to the opposite pole ofsuch wild visions of architecture as Piranesi gave the world inhis Car cere d* Invenzione. It will not include, for the purposeof this study, the architectural backgrounds of pictures,such asthe courts of Carlo Crivelli, or the porticoes and terraces ofVeronese. Architecture in these pictures is subordinate " it isthere to help out another idea ; and though its presentationimplies a knowledge of architectural form and composition, andpowers of draughtsmanship in this regard, such as are seldom tobe found in modem painting,the question here is in its main


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Purpose of Architectural Drawing 5issues a painter'squestion, to be determined by other considera-ions

than those of the presentation of architecture ; and Iwould only call the attention of all students in painting to thenecessityfor its serious study as an essential part of their trainingfor decorative painting.

A difference at once presents itself in architectural drawingsaccording to the intention with which they are made. Thisintention may be either objective or subjective; that is, the ^intention of the draughtsman may be either to make drawingswhich can be carried out in the building by other hands exactly asdrawn, or, on the other hand, he may wish to produce in some-ody

else's mind the impression of the building as a whole ashe conceives it, or he may employ architectural forms as thesymbols and embodiments of some abstract idea, the imageryof a world which never has existed in fact, and never can. Someof the French draughtsmen so used them in the seventeenthcentury, and, in a far more notable manner, Piranesi in theeighteenth. In the first case he will proceed by geometrical draw-ngs

; in the second and third by perspective representation,withsuch accessories as skiography, figure or landscape drawing, andthe Uke, as may be necessary to drive home his ideas.

The geometrical drawings are the usual plans, sections, andelevations of a design familiar to the architectural student, andgenerallyset out to a scale of ^ and ^ inch to the foot. There areonly two essential conditions of such drawings : (i)that they should "be perfectlyaccurate ; (2) that they should be perfectlyclear. Thefirst condition is, of course, largely one of knowledge and care ;the draughtsman must know exactly what he means if his draw-ngs

are to be accurate and if they are to hang together. It hasto be recollected that the ultimate intention of these geometricaldrawings is their translation into stone, bricks, and mortar, orwhatever material it may be, by a builder who, except for these


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6 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmenyirawingsand the supplementary specification,is absolutelyignorant of what was in the designer's mind, and who at hisbest plays the role of an intelligentand conscientious trans-ator.

But what can the poor man do when he is brought upagainst vagaries such as wall-platesto an ordinary roof of narrowspan measuring 12 inches by 10 inches, which I once saw in adrawing, or mouldings that would make even their author shudderif he had the sUghtest idea of the only possibleresult of his effortswhen realised in practice? One cannot help wondering whatmust be the thoughts of experienced builders of the old-fashionedschool when they come face to face with some of the drawingswith which they have to deal. As to the numerous troubleswhich arise from the total discrepancy of plan, section, and eleva-ion,

or from the careless setting out of details of construction,these are so obvious that I need not dwell on them here, exceptto urge architectural students to bear constantly in mind that aloose, inaccurate working drawing is as culpable and mischievousas a loose, inaccurate statement of fact, and that it is no use adesigner setting about a geometrical drawing till he is quite surein his own mind what it is he wants to do, and how he is goingto do it. In order to arrive at this, no amount of trouble shouldbe spared in preliminary sketches.

The second condition " that the drawings should be perfectlyclear " follows from the first. Certain vicious tendencies in archi-ectural

drawings have appeared in recent years, notably the useof a very thick line, and the use of a very thick line in connectionwith a much thinner line. The use of the thick line was in fashionwhen I was a student in the Academy thirty years ago, and wasdue to the medieval procHvitiesof William Burges, a fine draughts-an,

spoiltby his fondness for posing. It was in i860 that Burgesread a paper on architectural drawing at the Royal Institute ofBritish Architects, in which he advocated the use of " a good strong


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Purpose of Architectural Drawing 7thick bold line," as he put it, " so that we may get into the habitof leaving out those prettinesseswhich only cost money and spoilour design " " excellent advice, which he was the last man in theworld to follow himself. Street, who was present, suggested thatthe whole thing was rubbish, and that every artist would findhis own line. Feeling ran high in those days, and Burges onanother occasion retorted that it was a pity Street could notbuild his own cross-hatching. The real pity was that neitherof these considerable artists attempted to place himself in touchwith a reasonable tradition of drawing, and their labours havebeen, in consequence, in vain. Burges deUberately copied the methodof a medieval draughtsman, with the result that what should havebeen studies of fact were little more than exercises in style.

The second, and possibly even more injurious,use of the thickline and the thin hne has originated in competitions. In a roomfull of drawings by different designers, competitors have fearedthat their drawings would be overlooked unless some strong,insistent line shouted its existence at the spectator. I have seenlines on half-scale drawings measuring, by the scale, 2 inches inthickness. Of course, with variations of lines such as this, notonly are all the refinements and subtleties of architecture lost,but the breadth of effect goes too. Nor do I believe that such amethod makes any but an unfavourable impression on an assessorwho knows his business, and who, of course, reads the elevationby the plan and section. As to the builder, the effect of suchmethods of drawing must be simply paralysing. The Hne usedin geometrical drawings should be firmly drawn, uniform in thick-ess,

sufficient to express neither more nor less than the architec-uralfeatures intended. To put it another way, the designer

should have thought out exactly what he wants before he putshis final line to paper, for the line so drawn becomes a businessdatum of serious importance, as careless architects have found to


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8 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmentheir cost when the damning evidence of an ill-considered linestares them in the face in their contract drawings.

I would warn students also against an abuse of skiography,which has become far too common in recent years ; and that is,the habit of projecting violent shadows over every part of theplan. The result is that the drawings are illegible.I have seenplans which look like an arrangement of haycocks, in which theshadow of the column is far more prominent than the plan of thecolumn itself. Nothing whatever is gained by this, and besidesmaking the plan unreadable it also makes it very ugly. Ingeometrical drawings students should eschew all such tricks anddevices, and be content to do a plain thing in a plain way.

The situation is almost reversed when we come to the secondfunction of architectural drawing, that of producing in the mindof another the impression of an architectural idea. We are notconcerned here with a bare and literal statement of facts. Theimpression aimed at is a complex one ; that is, the draughtsmanaims at producing the impression not only of certain abstractforms of architecture, but of those forms as a whole, and as awhole considered in relation to its placing on the site, its environ-ent

of sky and landscape, and even the intention of the building.All these matters have an important bearing on the value ofthe design, and their presentation is scarcelyless essential than thedata given by the working drawings, in the building up of thetotal impression to be conveyed to another mind. The line thatin the geometricaldrawing had to be hard and precisenow becomessensitive, even tentative, feeUng its way and clinging on to theidea, as it were, in order to suggest it in all its multifarious com-lexity.

Absolute and exhaustive accuracy of detail is lessimportant here than accuracy in the statement as a whole. Itmay be found, in settingup a perspective of a building accordingto the strict rules of the art, that the result is disappointing;


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10 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmenin his "prison" series, is the most remarkable instance ofan artist who expressed ideas by means of architecturalforms, where another artist might have attempted to do so bymeans of figures,and in a feebler form the tendency appearsin Panini, Hubert Robert, and the eighteenth century paintersof ruins.

Before I proceed to trace the development of architecturaldrawing and illustration, I should call the student's attention toa useful half-way house between the two extremes of geometricaldrawings and perspective,and that is isometrical projection. Theobject of this is to show in one drawing, plan and elevation. Thehnes do not vanish in either case, so that the drawing is not inperspective,though at first sight it has some appearance of it,and it is this that differentiates it from drawings where the plan,though shown with the elevation, is set out in perspective,such asthe beautiful drawing by Bramante in the Ufiizi Gallery at Florenceof a project for St. Peter's. The usual method of isometricalprojectionis to set down to scale the ground and upper planssquare to the bottom line of the picture,and one above and behindthe other, on a guide line set out to an angle of 45 degrees, orwhatever angle best shows the purpose of the building. Onthis guide line the heights of the features which it is intendedto show are set out to the scale of the plan and the lines ruledoff from these points. In Spiers and Anderson's Architectureof Greece and Rome there is a masterly isometrical view ofthe Colosseum by Guadet, which shows what an immense amountof information can be given in one drawing by the use ofthis process. In the illustration facing p. 12 from Choisy'sArt de Batir chez les Romains there is a variation in themethod described above, the plan being set out at an angle.Choisy used this method freely to illustrate his History ofArchitecture.


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Purpose of Architectural Drawing nThough architecture is in one sense the oldest of the arts, archi-ectural

drawing, as we know it, is comparatively modem. Ido not doubt that when Ictinus designed the Parthenon, a set-ing

out of the most delicate accuracy must have been made ;those subtleties of outline and profile,the rules of which haveonly been discovered and determined by the careful calculationsof expert students, could never have been carried out by rule ofthumb or by eye. Nor, again, is it possible to conceive of thegreat Roman Thermae being set out without very careful plans ;but any such plans have necessarilyperished, and it is a regret-able

fact that from time immemorial Uttle attention has beenpaid to architects' drawings, masterpieces of technical dexterityand draughtsmanship though they have often been. When thebuilding was once up nobody cared about the drawings ; but onewould sacrifice a good many bad pictures for the working draw-ngs

of the Baths of Caracalla. Vitruvius refers to the drawingof plan and elevation in a very cursory manner, but no record orany fragment, even of a plan, has reached us, unless we includethe marble plan of Rome, which Vespasian and afterwards Severusset up in the Templum Sacrae Urbis.

With the gradual break-up of the Roman Empire most of thesecrets of an older art were lost. Architecture splitup into Eastand West, and the best of it went East ; but we know little ornothing of the methods of practice of the Byzantine architects.Anthemius of Tralles is described as the architect of Santa Sophia,but his actual title was '' firjxa^o-^ouxi/'he maker of machinesand devices, less of the architect than the engineer and builder.The Romanesque buildings show little trace of the architect'spencil. Vigorous and picturesque as many of them were, theywere yet such as could have been built by masons on the generalinstruction of a superior authority. The mere diagram plan withinscriptions of the monastery of St. Gall, made in the ninth


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12 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmencentury, is an instance,* and such, in fact, continued to be thepracticeof building till well into the Middle Ages. There is, Ibeheve, no evidence for supposing that William of Wykeham wasan architect or, indeed, other than an influential and highlyintelligent person who organised the finance and conduct ofimportant building enterprises,and was, in fact, in the positionof the patron, or client, as we call him, not in that of eitherthe modem architect or builder. Here, indeed, we are met by adifficult problem. The intricacies of Gothic vaulting,the settingout of groining-ribs,emes, tercerets, and the like, tax the bestabihties of the modem draughtsman, and it is difficult to imaginethat no general scheme, plan, section, and elevation of cathedralsso complete and homogeneous as Sahsbury or Lincoln was pre-ared

and on the works throughout the periods of their building ;yet authentic examples of real working drawings, with properplans and sections, as well as elevations, are extremely rare, ifthey exist at all. There are certain drawings of the cathedralsof Siena and Cologne, and there are the two elevations of the westfront of the Cathedral of Orvieto, supposed to have been madeby Lorenzo del Maitano of Siena soon after 13 lo, when he wasappointed capo-mcestro of the Duomo. These drawings, whichwere not carried out, are not really working drawings, inasmuchas they are set out in shght perspective which, though not correct,is near enough to make one doubt whether they can be as earlyas 1310, and one's suspicions are heightened by the precisionof the draughtsmanship and the fine drawings of the figures inthe tympanum of the central archway. The designs are in theItaUan manner of Gothic, with rectangular compartments forcarving, which assort ill with the pinnacles,gables,and floriatedcrockets of the upper part of the design.

" Burges describes this in the paper I have referred to ; but by no stretch of imagina-ioncould it be considered a working drawing.


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VI!

7

rt-rSr fr.f- w ti'Sff

FALATiK

Isometrical Drawing. By A. Choisy. From LArt de Batir chez ks Romains


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Purpose of Architectural Drawing 13These drawings are, I believe, the nearest approach to a work-ngdrawing to be found in the Middle Ages ; but I doubt if they

were made with that object, or that the necessity for workingdrawings was seriouslyfelt by the Gothic builders. On the otherhand, that there were men who could draw, and draw very well,is proved by the famous sketch-book of Villard de Honnecourt.This book was once in the possessionof FeUbien, the well-knownhistoriographerof Louis XIV., and though he appears to haveknown httle about its origin,he was too good a judge not to reahsethe remarkable quaUty of its draughtsmanship, and that at atime when Le Brun was dictator of the arts in France and J. H.Mansart its leading architect. Attention was drawn to the bookby Quicherat in 1849, and when Lassus and Darcel reproducedthe httle album by hthography in 1858, and WiUis's annotatededition appeared in 1859, most of the Gothic revivaUsts regarded itas the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth ; the sanction,in fact, to the ingenious h5^otheses which they had hithertoevolved from their inner consciousness. But its effect was, Ithink, to make their art even more unreal and histrionic than itwas before, because they mistook the lesson to be learnt from thestudies of this artist, who drew what he liked in his own naturalmanner and as he saw it. For the methods of presentation whichmay be sincere and genuine in one age become mere conventionsin another ; tricks of drawing that have lost their meaning, becausethey have been divorced from the patient observation of facts.Yet Burges was so deUghted that he set to work to make a vellumsketch-book of his own in the manner of de Honnecourt " a volumeof thirty-sixsheets, bound in green leather as a pocket-book, andnow in the Hbrary of the Royal Institute of British Architects.This he filled with drawings of elephants,rhinoceros, birds andbeasts, the Rose of Sharon, heartsease and honeysuckle, crockets,gargoyles,scraps of architecture,fancy heads, all drawn in that


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14 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmen" good strong thick bold line," as Burges called it, one cannothelp feeling,with an eye to their effect on the page and the veri-imilitude

of the Gothic manner, rather than as searching studies offorms. It was a pity,because Burges could draw very well when hetook the trouble. It was a pity,too, that nobody, in fact, knewanything about Villard de Honnecourt, and not even to a centurywhen he was bom. That he was an observant and most spiriteddraughtsman is shown by his sketches, drawn in ink on vellum witha strong, trenchant line ; and nothing came amiss to Villard "men and animals, stags, Uons, sheep and horses, ostriches, eagles,grasshoppers,flying buttresses, bays of Rheims Cathedral, mould-ngs

and details of architecture, a drawing of the Tower of Laonwith the famous cows, the apse of Cambrai, and one or two sheetsof figuresset out in geometrical diagrams, exercises in design whichhad a pecuUar fascination for artists down to the middle of thesixteenth century. Probably Villard was not an architect as weshould understand the term, but he was an artist,and the artswere not differentiated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.He drew whatever took his fancy, and in nearly all his drawingsthere is the same keen vitaUty. The two figureswrestlingsuggesta professionalwresthng match more vividly than any photograph,because the artist has seen and reahsed the essential qualitiesofsuch a contest, and has given us a summary statement, symbolicalof wrestling matches in general, of the watching for an opening,the tense strain of adversaries playing for the final grip. Thesame quality of line and selection appears in the admirable draw-ng

of a swan, and the strange-looking creature above it, ratherlike a sloth with its great claws. Another figure here reproduced(facingp. 15) tells its story with pathetic intensity a brief noteof the utter abandonment of despair.

These drawings deserve the careful study of the architecturalstudent, not as models for imitation, but as examples of what may


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Purpose of Architectural Drawing 15be done in drawing by very simple means, if these means arebased on personal study and observation, and inspired by realconviction. It must not be supposed for an instant that thesedrawings are the work of an immature man, but Villard could notescape the tradition of his time. He belonged to the school ofthose artists who designed the glorious windows of Bourges andChartres, men who concealed under a rather formal conventionstrong feelingand a burning imagination, and Villard de Honne-court must have observed much and drawn a great deal before hecould have reached this power and flexibilityf Une. To a modemarchitectural student the plans of apses and chevets, indicated inrough freehand, may seem loose and ragged, and so they are ;but they were probably not intended for more than the briefestnotes, to remind Villard of places that he had seen and admired.And if it came to carrying them out, it is quitepossiblethat littlemore than such rough indications as these would have been givento the builder, complete and well-founded reliance being placedon the traditional knowledge of the master masons. For asbetween people with full knowledge a mere hint may be enough.These rough sketch plans are the work of a man who knew whathe was about, and only an artist who had studied these mattersclosely would have been able to set down one of these compli-ated

plans in correct proportion. To the architectural draughts-an,more particularly,drawing is the expression of knowledge

and the symbol of a fund of accumulated observations, and onefinds both in these medieval drawings and in the drawings of theearUer men of the Renaissance, the same power of selectingandindicating the essential parts of an architectural design. There isno labour wasted in mechanical finish. The draughtsman had inhis own mind a clear idea of what he intended to convey, andehminated all that was superfluous or could in any way obscurethe lucidityof its expression. There is in the work of these earlier


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i6 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmenmen a certain abstract austerity of statement which will disappearunder the more complicated conditions of later architecture.

No doubt there were other artists and designers in the MiddleAges as capable as Villard de Honnecourt : Eudes de Montreuil,and Hugh Libergiers,for example, and others, who are no morethan names, may have been such men ; but they and their draw-ngs

are unknown to us. So far as the individual artist is con-erned,there seems to be no liftingof the veil of the Middle Ages.

We do not know the names even of the sculptors of Rheims andx\uxerre, of Amiens or Notre Dame, or of the artist of the windowsof Bourges, or of the jewellers,enamellers, illuminators " thoseincomparable artists whose masterpieces afford us glimpses,far toorare, of a world of astonishing beauty and not less astonishingremoteness from ourselves. Had it been necessary to prepareelaborate working drawings, there can be little doubt that in aperiod so rich in art there were men who were capable of doing it.The probable explanation is that such drawings were not necessary,and that the tradition of building that undoubtedly existed amongworkmen and the tradition of design preserved by the clergy,rendered elaborate architectural drawings unnecessary. Whenthere was only one manner of building conceivable, both tobuilder and owner, general instructions from the latter wereenough, the rest was done by the mason working his stones andsettingthem out on the building as it grew.

At the end of the fifteenth century, when Gothic art was draw-ngto its close, there were men who could set up a geometrical

elevation of a Gothic facade. In Egger's collection there are a fewGerman drawings to scale, and one (facingp. 17),which I reproduce,is a drawing of considerable excellence, such as could only havebeen made by somebody who had been accustomed to geometricaldrawing, and who perfectlyunderstood the setting out of tracery.This is, however, I beUeve, a rare example of a working drawing


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Purpose of Architectural Drawing 17of the]^fifteenthentury. I know of no similar instances in Frenchor English Gothic, and incline to think that details were set outfull size and straightaway on the building. It is probable thatthe only instructions given were general directions to the work-en

to follow some famihar example. Even in the fifteenth cen-uryit is not to be supposed that a man hke Sir Reginald Bray

worked at a drawing-board,Hke a modem architect, when he had todeal with the Chapel of Henry VII. His share was to organiseand administer, and to decide on the general purpose and characterof his building. The workman, with an immemorial traditionbehind him, would have no difficultyn interpretingdirections sogiven, and though he might modify his detail here and there, andperhaps introduce some fancy of his own, he would not conceiveof the possibihtyof serious deviation from a well-marked path.As we shall see, in modem architecture this has been reversed.In the early days of the Renaissance, architecture was to agreat extent an exotic, introduced and run, if we may so put it,by scholars. It had to be explained, down to its minutest detail,to unlearned and ignorant men, and thus architectural draughts-anship,

which had Uttle or no place in medieval times, becameand remains an absolute necessityin neo-classic architecture.

It might be an interestingspeculationto consider how farsome of the quaUties of medieval architecture were due to theabsence of organised working drawings : its informaUty, its habitof improvisationin detail, its irregularitiesnd neglect of sym-etry

in design. The impHcit rehance on drawings in modempracticewould certainlyaccount for much of the mechanical quaUtyof modem Gothic. For Gothic architecture was essentially abuilder's art ; that is to say, its whole scheme and conduct werelocal, initiated and practisedon the spot, not administered froma distance ; and this had one immense advantage, that thedesigners worked in the concrete, not in the abstract " they saw


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i8 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmen

what they were doing, and could test and alter their programmeas the work went along. Our modem Gothic architects have

been trained, not in the workshop and on scaffolding, but in archi-ects'offices and schools. They have no means of conveying their

ideas to the builder but through a system of drawing which cameinto existence for the purpose of a quite different method of design.It is no doubt impossible nowadays to carry out a Gothic designexcept by means of the usual working drawings ; but I cannot

help thinking that here, as in other regards, the modem Gothicdesigner is kicking against the pricks, and would be wiser to sub-it

to the inevitable and design his buildings in a manner lessdependent on details and more on abstract quahties of hne andproportion which it is possible to convey to the builder by meansof careful working drawings.


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20 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmenin interest to the actual subject of the picture, for these artistsof the Renaissance were enthusiasts for the new architecture thatscholars were discovering for them from the remains of ancientRome, and their ingenuous minds were fascinated by experimentswith the newly formulated rules of perspective. All these painterswere humanists in their way " men who thought about their artand were keenly aUve to its many-sided problems ; painters whorealised in a way that has been forgotten in modem times thatthe Arts, though separate, are also related, and that the artistshould be alive to beauty in every art and in other arts than hisown. Architecture has been used, and admirably used, as abackground for their picturesby many painters since those days ;but the point of view has altered, and it is a far cry back fromthe columns and curtains of Mignard and Le Brun to the fantasticcourts and galleriesof Carlo CriveUi.

Architecture, as handled by the Itahan paintersof the earlierRenaissance, would be an interestingstudy, well worth the atten-ion

of painter students ; but it is outside my present subject,and I merely note that these men, by their enthusiasm andarchitecture, contributed to the spreading of new ideas, andalso in a special degree to the education of the humbler artistwho was strivingto illustrate Vitruvius and Albert! . The profilesand sections in CriveUi's " Annunciation " suggest the types givenin the early printed books of architecture, their immaturity andover-accentuation.

We left Villard de Honnecourt at some unknown date in theMiddle Ages, an accomphshed artist in his way, yet hardly, exceptin a summary and rudimentary manner, an architectural draughts-an.

I take him, from internal evidence, to have been wanderingabout France with his sketch-book early in the fourteenth century.After him, we draw the Middle Ages blank, with the exceptions Ihave noted and unimportant German exceptions at the end of


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Draughtsmen of the 16th Century 21the fifteenth century. Indeed, one might say with reasonableprobabilitythat architectural draughtsmanship did not exist, thenecessity for it not having as yet arisen in the practice of archi-ecture.

But meanwhile in Italy there had come about thatastonishingoutburst of intellectual activity which we call quitevaguely " the Renaissance." Scholars had revealed the splendourand the beauty of the ancient world, and the Arts were no longerthe expression of centuries of tradition moving by imperceptibledegrees, but represented the play of each man's mind on thesubject of his choice, and became to a great extent a matter ofpersonal revelation and initiative. The mere indications adequatein medieval architecture were useless when designers wished tobuild in a manner unknown to the ordinary workman. Morethan that, the designer had to master that manner himself, byunremitting study of the innumerable fragments of ancient archi-ecture

still left in Italy. The famous album of Giuliano da SanGallo is almost entirely devoted to studies of the antique, andthroughout the sixteenth century SerHo, Palladio, Vignola, DerOrme, Du Perac, BuUant, and a host of other enthusiasticstudents, spent years in collectingdetails of the antique, someby genuine research on the spot, others by cribbing freely fromeach other's sketch-books. It was owing to this emancipation ofthe individual and to this radical change in the aims and methodsof architecture that architectural draughtsmanship came intoexistence. It is, by its very nature, essentially modem art,the complement of methods of architecture and archaeology whichwere undreamt of in the Middle Ages, for it was the revival ofscholarship that brought about the study of archaeology,nd thetwo together that revolutionised architecture.

The astonishing thing is that architectural draughtsmanshipshould appear in Italy,completely equipped, within certain limits,in the latter part of the fifteenth century. The earliest example


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22 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmenthat I know is a drawing in the Ufiizi Gallery by Brunelleschi,who died in 1446. Except that the Corinthian pilasteris fifteendiameters high, it is a perfectly competent drawing ; but theRenaissance was beginning to move fast, and we now come toGiuUano da San Gallo, Fra Giocondo, and Bramante, men whowere almost exact contemporaries, Fra Giocondo and Bramantedying in 15 15, and the elder San Gallo the year after. In theVatican Library there is an album of drawings by Giulianoda San Gallo, the ablest of the elder generation of that famousfamily.* The drawings, seventy-six in number, are made inpen and ink on sheepskin sheets i foot 6 inches by i foot 3|-inches wide, evidently a liher aureus, in which only the most highlyprized examples of architecture were to be included. There areone or two designs by San Gallo himself, but most of his subjectsare taken from the ruins of Roman buildings in Italy. The dateon the cartouche on the title page is 1465, but it appears that thebook was only put together in 1490, as it includes a plan and eleva-ion

of a palace designed by San Gallo for Lorenzo di Medici in1488, and it was not till 1490 that Lorenzo officiallyllowed himthe title of " da San Gallo." There are, moreover, differences inthe draughtsmanship. Some of the earUer drawings are crude,and San Gallo never drew the figure well, but in many of thedrawings the profilesare firm and unfaltering, and the detailsare drawn with clearness and precision,as, for instance, the sheetof capitalswhich I reproduce. Here one gets, for the first time,

I the method of drawing architectural details which became general' in printed books of architecture of the following century ; andin its directness of statement and scholarly selection of essential

'\ features this is,in some respects, a model for technical book illus-* See G. Clausse, " Giamberii " {Antonio) called Da San Gallo for a detailed description

of this album and of the drawings by the elder San Gallo at Florence and Vienna.The album has been reproduced in facsimile by Otto Hannassowitz (Leipzig,1900).


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Sheet of details of the Colosseum. By Giuliano da San Gallo.Libro da Giuliano da San Gallo, Vatican Library

From the


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Drawing by Giuliano da San Gallo. From the Libro da Giutiano da. San Gallo,Vatican Library


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Draughtsmen of the 16th Century 23tration. The forms are given with a firm yet flexible line, witha minimum of shading and without any trace of that passion forelaborate finish which was introduced by the French draughts-en

of Louis XIV., and which never seems to have appealed tothe ItaHan temperament. These men were out after facts andtheir simplest record, and they passed on from one freshly dis-overed

or invented detail to another, impatient in their searchfor knowledge, careless almost of the effect of their drawings, andyet they did extremely well what they set out to do. In SanGallo's drawings there is no fumbling about for the forms of archi-ecture,

no misapprehension of their logicalpurpose, such as are [almost inevitable when the draughtsman does not understandwhat he is drawing. San GaUo was a well-trained architect whoknew very well what he was about " namely, the accumulation ofmaterials for the technique of the neo-classic. He appears, in thisrespect resembling Villard de Honnecourt, to have wandered aboutand drawn whatever took his fancy. There is a fine plan of SantaSophia, and a characteristic section on which he has drawn amermaid holding a ship,perhaps a note of his wanderings beyondthe seas. On the other hand, Giuliano da San Gallo had hislimitations ; though he was a conscientious and accurate draughts-an

of astonishing skill if we consider the state of architectureelsewhere, he was destitute, it seems, of that imaginative insightwhich makes some architects' sketches so delightfullysuggestiveand personal. The ten drawings by him in the Uffizi Gallery, inoutline and tint, show the same methodical care ; his work haslittle of the quality possessed in a high degree by his great con-emporary

Bramante and by the two most distinguished archi-ectsof the next generation, Baldassare Peruzzi and his own son

Antonio da San Gallo the younger. Still,in its scholarship andzeal for knowledge, the book of Giuliano da San Gallo marks theopening of a new outlook on architecture, from which tremendous


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24 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmendevelopments were to follow in the future, that untiring researchinto the architecture of the past which has been ever since anessential element of every architect's training.

The collection of plans and details, generally known as "TheSketch-book of Andreas Coner," now in the Soane Museum, is anotherexample, richer in plans than the work of San Gallo. Nothingis known of Coner, and the collection is called by his name onlyon account of a letter from him to Bernardo Rucellai, dated Rome,September ist, 1513, a copy of which appears in the book. Therewere certainlytwo artists at work in this collection,and probablythree or four.*

In the Uffizi Gallery there is a drawing in outline and tint byFra Giocondo.f It is well drawn, but chieflyremarkable for thevery fine sketch in ink of a figureleaning back much foreshortened.Bramante has nine characteristic drawings at the Uffizi, notablythat perspective study in plan and elevation of a project forSt. Peter's, to which I referred in my first chapter J an admirableand most workmanhke drawing, which not only shows veryclosely the designer's intention, but suggests that a certainroughness and carelessness, which I have noted in others ofhis drawings, was temperamental, and not in the least degreedue to inexactness of thought or want of dexterity. The work,however, that shows most clearly Bramante' s power as anarchitectural draughtsman is the magnificent engraving in theBritish Museum, of which only one other copy is known to exist.The plate measures 2 feet 4 inches high by i foot 8 inches wide, andis not dated. It represents the interior of a temple or hall, withtwo vaulted aisles,of which the upper part is shown broken and

* See the Introduction by Dr. Ashby and the reproductions in facsimile issued bythe British School at Rome in 1904.

fSee Disegni di Architettura Civile et Militate in the Uffizi Gallery,Florence, pub-ishedby Giacomo Brogi (Florence, 1907).

% Brogi, Plate VIII.


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From " The Book of Andreas Coner." Soane Museum


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Engraving by Bramante. In the British Museum


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Draughtsmen of the 16th Century 25ruinous. In the foreground is the kneeling figureof an old man,with head and forepartof a horse on the right, and young menin the dress of the time standing about beyond. In the centreof the left aisle is a candelabrum on a pedestal on two steps, andthe aisle ends in a half octagon apse, with a great shell upsidedown in the semi-dome. In the tympanum of the arch above isa circular opening through which is shown the back of a bust.It is a strange drawing, of which the meaning is obscure ; butit shows a rare faculty of chastened architectural design, and atechnique based on that of his master, Andrea Mantegna, andscarcely inferior to the work of that incomparable artist. I donot desire to draw invidious comparisons when I call attentionto the difference of intellectual and imaginative outlook shownin this engraving as compared with the drawings made by Villardde Honnecourt, say two hundred years before, the medievaUstnoting his details with child-like candour, and also with a vivacityof observation given only to children,and the man of the Renaissancein the plenitude of his skill and knowledge, searchingfor hiddenmeanings, Hving again in a half imaginary world of the past.

Giuliano da San Gallo, his brother, his son Antonio, andBramante and his pupils may be taken as the founders of archi-ectural

drawing, and their drawings, as compared with the workof later draughtsmen, have an almost archaic purity of line. Inthe collection of projects for St. Peter's at Rome, published byde Geymiiller in 1875, there are reproductions of drawings by allthese men, and the differences of method are characteristic.Bramante's own drawings are impatient and masterful " roughnotes of what was passing in his mind rather than finished studies-His plan of St. Peter's is sketched in chalk on squared paper, andin the freehand drawing of St. Pietro in Montorio he has not takenthe trouble to set out the circular perspective of the stairs withany approach to accuracy. Bramante's powers, both as a designer


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26 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmenand a draughtsman, are beyond question ; but Peruzzi, his pupiland assistant, and the greatest of the Renaissance architects, wentmore to the root of the matter in the drawings which he made forBramante, as in that splendid and characteristic sheet of plan andperspectivesketches made in 1505-6. At the Uffizi there are sevendrawings by Peruzzi, including the plan of the Massimi Palace toscale, a finelydrawn sheet of details,and a remarkable perspec-ive

showing certain of the ancient buildings combined in onedrawing, an exercise of which the architects of the Renaissancewere very fond, and which continued in use down to the eighteenthcentury. Among the drawings attributed to Raphael in the samecollection is an admirable drawing of a Doric vestibule, with aseated figure of a soldier on the step in the foreground, which isprobably by Peruzzi. This artist and Antonio da San Gallo theyounger possessed an extraordinary freedom of drawing in pen-and-ink. In de Geymiiller'scollection of projects for St. Peter'sthere are some deHghtful Uttle perspectivestudies of architecturalmotives by the younger San Gallo. These side notes and sketchesseem to me exactly the sort of thing that students ought to aimat in working out their designs,trial flightsof imagination, realisa-ions

of the effect in perspective of the geometrical design. Ifthe designer has not clearlyin his mind what he is about, he oughtto visualise his ideas by rough sketches of the blocking and com-osition

of his building, and this will often reveal unexpecteddifiiculties and, on the other hand, valuable motives of design.The skill and trueness of hand shown in these suggestive sketchesare a strikingtestimony to the great abilityof the younger SanGallo, and to the range of his knowledge of architectural forms.

That such drawings could only be made by a man who wasboth a fine draughtsman and a master of architecture is provedby two examples. In the library of the Royal Institute ofBritish Architects there is a volume of sketch designs for


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Draughtsmen of the 16th Century 27buildingsby Chambers and Venn. Chambers was the famousarchitect of Somerset House, and Yenn, though an uninterestingperson, arrived at the dignity of a Royal Academician. Yettheir drawings are ragged and ignorant compared with suchsketches as those of San Gallo. Their authors, whether Chambersor Yenn, or both, lacked the grip of architecture, the surenessof line, which distinguisheshe work of the Italian. The otherexample is a painter. In de Geymiiller's collection there is areproduction of a sheet of drawings of domed churches attri-uted

to Leonardo da Vinci. I do not know if the attribution iscorrect, but the drawing is as uncertain as the half-thought-outideas they attempt to indicate, and if the drawing is authenticit would dispose once and for all of the claims of that great artistto architectural attainment " claims, indeed, which have neverbeen substantiated by any evidence worth the name. I refer tothis because not only students, but many others often fail toreaUse the fact that the power of drawing architecture well is, tothis extent, on all fours with the power of drawing the figurewell,and is only to be obtained in both cases by close observation andhard-won knowledge. As a fine example of figure drawing andarchitecture, in which both are understood and handled by amaster, I give the remarkable drawing in the collection of theScottish National Gallery,attributed to Lelio Orsi da Novellara(1511-87).

Architectural draughtsmanship, as handled by the men I havenamed, was now mature and as complete as was necessary fortheir purpose ; but at about this time " at the beginning,that is,of the sixteenth century " a fresh factor,of vast possibilities,ppearsin the printed and illustrated books of architecture. The firstillustrated edition of Vitruvius was publishedat Venice by Johannesde Tridino, alias Tacuino, in 15 ii, with the title of M. Vitruviusper Jocundum Solifo Castigatiorfactus, cum figuriset Tabula ut


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28 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmenjam legi et intelUgipossit. This modest expectation was im-erfectl

fulfilled,s may be seen from the illustration (p. 83) of" Opus signinum," the laying of concrete foundations. In therare little Giunta edition of 1513 the illustrations are rougher still.The draughtsmanship here exhibited was at first and for manyyears a very humble affair. It seems surprising,fter Bramante'smagnificent engraving, that the early editions of Vitruvius shouldhave been illustrated as crudely as they were. The hmitations ofthe wood-block engraver had a good deal to do with it ; but Ialso suspect that those enterprisinghouses, Johannes de Tridinoof Venice, Philippus di Giunta of Florence, and Fezandat of Paris,did not care to pay the price demanded by reallycompetent men.As a matter of fact, these architectural illustrations were extremelyrough. The draughtsman had not yet made up his mind whetherhe was dra^ving geometrical elevations or a perspective, so hecombined the two. On the other hand, in illustratingthe life ofprehistoricman as described by Vitruvius, he was capable of suchfancy drawings as that on p. 13 (editionof 151 1),and he evidentlyfelt much more at his ease with the ram's head of the battering-rams, than with the Corinthian and Ionic orders. The details ofclassical architecture were still very strange to the illustrator. Inthe Hypnerotomachia (1499) ^^^ architecture is altogether inferiorto the figure,nor did it improve to any appreciable extent in thenext generation.

The first genuine advance in architectural illustration seemsto have been made by Serlio in his Architettura. Serlio was not afine draughtsman in any sense, but he followed GiuHano da SanGallo in the critical spiritand the anxiety to get at the facts withwhich he appHed himself to the study and presentation of archi-ecture.

The fine plan and section and the sheet of elevation anddetails of the Colosseum are pretty much what an intelligentstudent of architecture might endeavour to make at the present


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Sheet of Details from the Colosseum. By Sebastiano Serllo (Venice, 1544)


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Plate XXVII, Regola delk Cinque Ordinu By Giacomo Barrozzio da Vignola


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Draughtsmen of the 16th Century 29day, allowing for the exigencies of the woodcut. Here, again, ifone compares them with the architectural detail of Villard deHonnecourt, the difference between the medievalist and the menof the Renaissance is apparent, the first just noting the idea ofan apse in singleline, the second measuring, conscientiouslyplot-ing

the plan even of so huge a building as the Colosseum, andsupplementing this with careful studies of the detail. Serlio'sLihro Terzo was a memorable achievement, and set the type ofarchitectural illustration in Italy for the rest of the century. Thecurious thing is that he himself lost touch of it in the dull andlaboured plates of his Extraordinario Libra, published at Lyons in155 1 ; but Serlio had failed at the French Court, and perhaps thisbook represented the desperate effort of a broken man. Palladio\followed the methods of the Libro Terzo with a great deal of skilland not infrequent lapses into the banalities of his individualmanner ; but his details are clearlydrawn, and he had an excel-ent

sketchy way of indicating the plans and elevations of hishouses. Palladio was, in fact, an accomphshed draughtsman.His design for the completion of St. Petronio at Bologna is beau-ifully

drawn, and is technicallysuperior to any of the drawingsin that most interestingcollection, though it is inferior in interestto the strange design by Baldassare Peruzzi and the diagram draw-ngs

of Terribilia.* In spite of Palladio's undoubted ability andpre-eminent success, I incline to think that he was at least asintent on his public as on his art. Good man as he was, he was

" The drawings for the completion of St. Petronio are now in the museum of thatchurch. According to the author of the catalogue (M. Angelo Gatti, Bologna, 1894),the basis of the collection was formed by Terribiha about the year 1570. It now con-ains

some fifty-onedesigns and a wood model of the church dating from the sixteenthcentury. The most important of the designs are those made by Peruzzi between1522-23, Vignola about 1547, GiuUo Romano and C. Lombard (1546),Ranuzzi (1547);a design by Dominique de Varignana, which was actually begun in 1556 ; Terribilia 'sdesigns and diagrams ; designs by Palladio (1577-79) ; and by Rainaldi (1626).


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30 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmencontent with rather cheap and easy attainments, stucco insteadof masonry in his architecture, conventions instead of searchingstudy in his drawings ; and one will look in vain in his works foranything like such a drawing as this plate of the Composite orderwhich I reproduce from the rare first edition of Vignola's Regoladelle Cinque Ordini, dedicated to Cardinal Famese, and issued, IbeUeve, at about the same date as Palladio's Architettura.

The examples illustrated are typical of the methods of illus-ratingbooks on architecture, in use in Italy throughout the six-eenthcentury. The two illustrations from the title pages of

Barbaro's Vitruvius, pubhshed by Marcohni (1556),and Palladio'sArchitettura, published by Domenico Franceschi of Venice (1570),show how far they could go. It is not first-rate work, but it hasthe merit of simplicity of statement, and its technical superiorityis evident on a comparison with the illustrations of De I'Orme'sArchitecture of about the same date. De TOrme was an artist ofmuch abiUty and energy, but uncertain in taste, and a somewhatunscrupulous poacher. On p. 256, verso, in Chaudiere's * edition,is an illustration of a frontispiecewith two lofty obelisks at theend, lifted bodily from Serlio's fourth book (PlateLVIII., Venetianedition of 1551). One of his drawings of an Ionic capital,whichhe says he measured himself from the antique, has a suspiciousresemblance to a drawing by Antonio da San Gallo the elder in

.the Uffizi collection. De I'Orme's perspective view of the Chapelof Anet is out of drawing, so is the absurdly designed house onp. 254, verso, and the man who could do so badly as this wouldhardly have made the excellent sectional perspective of theColosseum on the opposite page, a drawing which was probablyannexed by De I'Orme from some Italian. There are otherexamples scattered up and down his book of the same sort, butthere is also much that is originaland authentic : his diagrams

* Paris, 1626, Regnauld Chaudidre.


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The Frontispiece of the Architettura of Andrea Palladio (1570j


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Draughtsmen of the 16th Century 31of stereotomy, his details of carpentry, his famous " good andbad architects," and the characteristic drawing of a CorinthianTriumphal Arch (Bk. VIII. 245), which he says was convertedfrom a triumph to a " grandissime desolation et desastre," the fateof most of poor De TOrme's schemes in his latter days. Thedrawing of part of the construction of a roof (p. 292) shows DerOrme at his best, and is an excellent example of a detail per-ectly

understood and clearlyrepresented. (See facing p. 27.)I have referred to De TOrme more on account of the historical

interest of his illustrations than for their value as drawings, butmeanwhile France had produced an architectural draughtsmanpure and simple, without paralleleither in England or in Italy.The Itahans had their own way of drawing architecture " a method,as will be seen from the illustrations from Serlio and Palladio, thatrather gHded over difficulties of detail, but was well adapted forshowing the general idea of a building in the most direct way.These men used a firm, thick line, suitable for the wood-block,and though, as in the case of Serlio, they employed perspectiveon occasion, it was perspective of a rudimentary sort, and theirdrawings were diagrams rather than illustrations. In 1575 Etiennedu Perac produced his Vestigidell'Antiquita di Roma, a rare bookcontainingsome thirty-ninefreehand sketches engraved on copper.Du Perac' s work has considerable archaeologicalvalue to this day.His object was, as he says in his dedication, " rappresentar fidel-mente i residui della Romana grandezza," and this he did with muchgreater loyalty than Palladio. But neither he nor the Itahansseem to have satisfied the French instinct for completeness, andthe next advance in architectural drawing was due to JacquesAndrouet du Cerceau, that indefatigabledraughtsman who spentMs hfe in turning out worthless architectural fancies and frag-ents

that did more harm than good, and also in making viewsof the great houses of France, which are of inestimable value.


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32 Architectural Drawing and DraughtsmenI have elsewhere * described Du Cerceau's positionas an artist,andshall merely sum up the conclusion I came to " that on the one handhe had Uttle genuine sense of architecture, and that as a designer ofmultifarious detail he was almost wholly mischievous, but that, on theother hand, the work that he did in his Plus Excellents Bastimens isquite admirable in its way, and of the highest value to the historicalstudent. One has only to compare them with Thorpe's drawings torealise the importance of the work done by the Frenchman.

Du Cerceau's technique was curious and, in a way, limited.He had at his command a line of imfalteringprecision; the splendidseries of drawings in the British Museum show that he could, ifhe wished, draw almost anything. On the other hand, there islittle trace of an imagination reaching beyond the subject, andgiving hints of alluringpossibilities,uch as is found in the thumb-ail

sketches of Peruzzi and the younger San Gallo. His drawingsare very clear and of scientific accuracy, but they leave one cold ;they are tight,if one may say so of a drawing, unsuggestive, imre-sponsive. Du Cerceau worked conscientiouslyat his versions ofbuildings,indifferent apparently to anything but the exact state-ent

of the building as it was. He seems to have been intenselyhonest in these drawings of buildings,and the opposite in hisfancy designs. And it is on the former that his enduring reputationrests. The other half of his work raises the whole question of thedraughtsman-designer ; that is, of the man who sits at his draw-ng-board,

and turns out design after design without regard tomaterials, and to the conditions of their reaUsation in fact. Therewas an unwholesome growth of such men at the end of the sixteenthcentury : Du Cerceau par excellence, followed by the Flemingsor Germans, Wendel DietterUn f and De Vries,% with their tedious

* History of French Architecture, 1494-1661 (Bell " Sons), Vol. I, pp. 147-150.t De Quinque Columnarum Simmetrica Distributione, per Vindelinum Dieterlin, Pictorein

argentinensera, 1593. { Vriese, or De Vries, published his book of designs in 1563,


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Draughtsmen of the 16th Century 33ingenuity and deplorable taste, and in a different manner bySambin,* of Dijon,a better draughtsman, but ambitious and vulgar.

These men were the forenmners of the much more consider-bledraughtsmen of the seventeenth century whom I shall discuss

in the next chapter. They are all members of the same family,industrious builders of chdteaux d'Espagne, indefatigablend un-rofitable

designers in the air. Du Cerceau was a draughtsman,Sambin a carver, Dietterlin a painter. Instead of approachingarchitecture from the point of view of planning and construction,of proportionand scale, they treated the art as free material forevery conceivable freak and caprice of ornament. It is possiblethat these plates may now and then suggest ideas. Personally,when looking through these books of design, from Du Cerceaudown to Oppenord, I have never found the thing I wanted, theexact phrase for the idea one wished to convey. That there hasalways been a market for such work is shown by the abimdanceof these books of design in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-uries.

Yet it seems to me almost impossiblethat, in a designthought out from end to end, a design that aims at unity of effect,these gobbets from another mind can be rightlyassimilated ; theycan only result in a compilation of architectural details withoutmeaning or cohesion. The point of view of such men is widelyremoved from that of the architect. The latter has to designunder specificconditions. The scale and character of his chimney-piece, for example, is conditioned by the scale and character ofthe room in which it stands, and it is not till he has these dataas a point of departure that flint and steel meet, as it were,and that his mind can begin to work to any purpose on the pro-lem

before him. But the draughtsman of the type of Du Cerceau," (Euvre de la DiversitS des Termes, etc., pax Maistre Hugues Sambin, demeurant k

Dijon. Lyons, 1572. A collection of designs of terminal figures,many of them of themost appaUing description.

F


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34 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmenthe omamentalist, is like the spider who spins his net anywhereand everywhere for the unwary ; moreover, he has, more oftenthan not, been caught in his own net, and been deceived by thefaciHty of his own pencil. Those curves and volutes and fancyfoUage were well enough in the drawn Hne, but quite another thingtranslated into some intractable material ; and it is here, in thisdisregard of material and handicraft, that the work of many ofthese draughtsmen and engravers has been so dangerous to theArts.

Here is a plate from De Vries engraved in 1563, and onefrom the book that Dietterlin dedicated " nobili et ornatissimoviro Conrad Schlosberger in 1593. I only show these plates inorder that the student may know what to avoid. Either of theseplates or any one of Sambin's " Termes " is an epitome of all thatis vile and abominable in design. Yet Dietterlin believed it to beserious architecture. He dedicated his work to amateurs, and"the ruder mechanics," as he calls the unfortunate workmen whowere to carry out his designs,and beheved he was doing serviceto the Art. Sambin describes one of his "Termes" as composedafter the five orders of the antique, and as "simple enenrichissement, bien proportionne."

The havoc that such men wrought in German and Flemishand in our own Elizabethan and Jacobean art is well known tostudents. When architectural draughtsmen launched out intosuchvStuff as this, there was no reason why they should ever stop.Men of the type of De Vries and Dietterlin, and even Du Cerceau,considered as omamentahsts, are the parasites of architecture,whom students should entirely eschew. The aim of the studentshould be first-hand knowledge acquired by study and observa-ion

; knowledge of the ends to be aimed at in art ; knowledgeof the methods and materials through which those ends are tobe realised. The draughtsman's line should be the expression of


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Sheet of Details. By De Vries (1563)


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A Design by Wendel Dietterlin (1593)


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36 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmenforms simply by internal meditation and without the aids andresources that draughtsmanship can supply in working out hisideas and giving them their final shape. At the bottom of baddraughtsmanship he imperfect powers of observation ; the eyehas not been sufficiently trained to become sensitive to refine-ents

of form and to subtle relations of proportion, a facultywhich is essential to fine architectural design. The constant studyof form is quite as important for the architect as it is for thesculptor, and the readiest means of qualifying oneself to visualiseform, to reahse it and render it inteUigible to others, is the studyof drawing. Architectural students have to learn to observeaccurately and closely, and this is the reason why trick drawingand merely conventional statements of objects seen are worsethan useless. That habit, if persisted in, ends by depriving thedraughtsman of the power of seeing things as they actually are,because he gets into the habit of regarding the objects that hesees not as so much fresh material for study and reaHsation, butmerely an occasion for trotting out one of his stock of pet con-entions.

Harding's trees and Front's buildings are the result.The remedy is the searching study of form. The men of fiftyyears ago " Burges, for example " used to urge strongly thenecessity of figure drawing for the architectural student, and Ithink they were perfectly right. There should be no unnecessarybarriers between the idea and its reaHsation, and one immediateobstacle can at any rate be removed by the tenacious andinteUigent study of draughtsmanship.


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Plate IX. Li'vre d*Architecture, By Alexander Franclni (1640)


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CHAPTER III

FRENCH DRAUGHTSMEN OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Du Cerceau founded two traditions of architectural draughts-anshipin France : the first, that of details of design for every

sort of decoration ; the second, and far more valuable one, thatof the accurate record of existing buildings. Du Cerceau him-elf

had run riot in all sorts of caprices, and nothing came amissto his imtiring pencil " candlesticks, cabinets, jewellery, metal-work, grotesques, arabesques, houses, temples, subjects fromreUgion and mythology " he dealt with all, with impartial andimdeviating bad taste. His successors in France were rather morecautious, and, for a time, produced collections of designs for specialarts and handicrafts, such as the treatise on ironwork issued byMatthurin Jousse of La Fleche, in 1625, a work prepared with someregard to the actual processes of the metal-worker. MatthurinJousse was blacksmith to the Jesuits of La Fldche, and was helpedby Martellange, the Jesuit architect, in the preparation of hisbooks.* Of Barbet and Collot, who both issued collections ofarchitectural details a few years later, very little is known. Barbetdedicated a book of altars and chimney-pieces to RicheUeu,engraved by Abraham Bosse, in 1635. His illustrations are ofinterest because, according to his own account, they were drawnfrom recent examples in Paris, and so represent the details of

* Matthurin Jousse was a remarkable man in his way, for he also published a transla-ionof Viator's Perspective in 1626, a treatise on carpentry, and a treatise on the five

orders, and in 1642 a book on stereotomy entitled Le Secret d' Architecture, dicouvrantfidilement les traits gSonUtriques." See Destailleur's Notices sur Quelqttes Artistes Franfais,pp. 52-54-

37


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38 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmendomestic architecture in the Uttle-studied period of the reign ofLouis XIII. Collot's work, though different in manner, belongsto the same period. Both men were contemporaries of Le Muet,the well-kuown architect, and of Francini, the engraver and water-engineer of Florence. Francini's designs of doorways accordingto the five orders are in the taste of the worst designs of the timeof Louis XIII., and in no sense representativeof the best workof a period which has been Uttle studied and imperfectlyunder-tood

by modem students. The one which is reproduced (facingp. 36, Plate IX.) is the least offensive of a bad lot,but it is onlyfair to Francini to mention that in his preface he disclaims anyqualificationfor his work but the amiable, if inadequate, merit ofa sincere admiration for architecture as the first of the arts.

Pierre Le Muet, on the other hand, was an able architect.His Maniere de hien Bastir was the first serious attempt to dealwith domestic architecture since the days of De I'Orme's colossalundertaking. The plates are well drawn and well engraved, andstudents in studying the work of Le Muet should be careful todo so in the originaledition, and not in the abominable reprintthatJombert pubUshed in the eighteenth century, for Jombert wasone of those publishingpirateswho collected plates of all kindsand dates, touched them up and usually spoilt them, and thenreissued them as new pubUcations. Le Muet's work sufferedmore than most of them at his hands. Plate I. of the second partin the edition of 1647 is a characteristic example of Le Muet'smethod, and shows the difference between the work of the trainedarchitect and the casual designer such as Francini. AbrahamBosse, the draughtsman and engraver, a capable but very quarrel-ome

artist,pubHshed his treatise on the drawing of the five ordersin 1664,* a finelyengraved folio containing many plates of detailsof the orders, and some geometricaldesigns of doorways which

" A second edition was issued in 1688, in which the dedication to Colbert is omitted.


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Designs for Arabesques. Drawn by Jean Lepautre. Engraved by MarieMe


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40 Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmenirony, and Lepautre atoned for the error of his ways by engravingsof unimpeachable loyalty to the throne. His real interest asan artist begins with his amazing sets of designs for decorations,of which the earhest known example is dated 1657.* He produceddesign after design for every conceivable decoration " interiors,chimney-pieces,ceilings,alcoves, cartouches, mausolea, grottoes,fountains, and vases " the series seem inexhaustible. Mariette saysthat Lepautre hardly took the trouble to make any prehminarystudies, but began straight away on the copper, improvising ashe went ; and this quahty is, I think, characteristic of Lepautre.His mind must have worked with extraordinary rapidity. Thereis little trace of profound study in his work, and no affectationwhatever of archaeologicalresearch. In his ceiUngs,for example,he adopted off-hand the general arrangement of ribs and com-artments

customary at the time. But given that as a datum,his fancy began to play on it with a richness and facilitythatrecalls to some extent the exuberant genius o

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